Hans Zimmer

This is the only bit of master class that's going to be important [INAUDIBLE].
When you start on a project, you are working with the director.
Everybody else is secondary noise.
You and the director make a pact that you're going to do this movie together, and you're going to do your utmost and your best to go and make his film great, even if it means you have to kill him sometimes.
But your allegiance is with the director.
And yes, what the producers say and what the studio says and-- and they're great comments, they're amazing comments usually.
And you have to take them on board.
And you want to take them on board.
But you have to filter them and transform them into, is this helpful to the film the director is trying to make, because I don't know how else to do it.
Films aren't made by committee.
It seems like it sometimes, but not really.
If you take Ron Howard, Ridley Scott, Chris Nolan, and Terry Malick, I mean, they are directors that work in very different styles.
But really, at the end of the day, we've all come together at the same sort of place.
I have to get into his head.
And that's part of the process, because what I want to do is I want to make the movie that he wants to make.
That's what I signed on for.
You know, I want to have a bit of his vision.
So, I work really very hard at trying to understand and have conversations about what this movie is about.
And of course, the weird thing is that we don't really talk about the movie.
We talk about everything else.
We're trying to sort of sneak up on the subject.
Because ultimately, he has to hand over the job of directing, in a funny way, to me.
And the best directors-- and you know, the people I work with time and time again, I mean, they do it with-- they sort of hand it over with great joy.
You know, they get excited about something new coming.
You know, somebody new coming into the party.
You know, with Terry Malick, I mean, I spent a year before Terry went off to shoot "Thin Red Line." We were just talking about art.
We were talking about philosophy, and we were talking about paintings.
The thing we sort of agreed on really early on-- I'd read the script and it was 198 pages, which is a lot of script.
So I said to him, Terry, might it not be a really good idea if we never talked about the script anymore, we just talked about what we want to do with the script.
You know, what's the subtext, what are the other things we want to do.
And we-- God, we talked a-- you know, it was a year-long conversation.
We talked a lot about church paintings, you know, the way the light in Baroque painting, you know, hit through the cloud.
You know, that ray of light.
And I think that's really what those conversations are.
And that's what all those directors have in common, that the conversation is one where we're trying to learn from each other, and we're trying to le...

Tell a story with music

Hans Zimmer didn’t see a film until he was 12 years old. Since then, he’s scored over 150 films, including Inception, The Lion King, and The Dark Knight. In his MasterClass, the self-taught Academy Award winner teaches how he creates sounds from nothing, composes compelling character themes, and scores a movie before ever seeing it. By the end, you’ll have everything you need to tell your story.

Watch, listen, and learn as Hans teaches his first-ever film scoring class.

A downloadable workbook accompanies the class with lesson recaps and supplemental materials.

Upload videos to get feedback from the class. Hans will also critique select student work.